Jupiter’s Southern Hemisphere From Orbit

Jupiter From South Temperate Latitude This image was created from four images taken from the JunoCam camera on the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter on an unique circumpolar orbit giving the first ever views of Jupiter’s polar regions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft). The camera is a “push-broom” type imager, generating an image as the spacecraft turns moving the sensor in sweeping motion over the observation area. It has a field of view of 58 degrees and can never get the whole planet in view although it come closest to doing this when it passes over the polar regions at a distance of 100,000km.  At its closest approaches JunoCam could achieve 15 km/pixel resolution from 4300 km, while Hubble has taken images of up to 119 km/pixel from 600 million km. The camera uses a Kodak image sensor, the KODAK KAI-2020, capable of color imaging at 1600 x 1200 pixels: less than 2 megapixels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam

This image which shows the entire planet from a perspective of the southern temperate zone is a composite of four separate images taken from varying distances of 10,800km to 42,000km on Juno’s 18’th orbit of Jupiter called Perijove 18. Combining these images required considerable work on Photoshop because the images were taken at different locations and at vastly different distances. The image captures both the Great Red Spot near the top and the unique south polar region at the bottom. It also shows the familiar belts(dark) and zones(light) that circle Jupiter at the temperate latitudes. The belts are areas of downward flow and the zones are upward flow and they are separated by alternating high speed jets that have speeds of up to 250mph.